Well... Making the distance dark might not be a good way of implying depth at all, if the whole place is supposed to be lit.
How about if it gradually got lighter, and not darker, in its center - perhaps as though you're heading towards an exit? [light at the end of the 'tunnel'?] Or perhaps - if you want to be inventive enough - the glow of the coloured Chaos Emerald you'll be picking up?
...Why the need to change the lightning in the distance, anyway? Do you see the other side of the street darker or lighter? I know I don't.
Yes, if we'll take the 3D route, there is no reason to use 2D objects. (they won't look any HD at all on track turns) Ultima do you have any example of 3D program you coded? [/quote] ...Well I think 3D with 2D sprites would look good... (Ragnarok anyone?) But Im going 2D I think, M.E style for the stages, Vinc. for the 2D sprites and my emeralds would be really really awesome. Also, I think 2D would be less graphic stressing...
Instead of fog, you could have the opacity of the tube fade away like in Sonic R... that way you'd have a smooth transition to the background.
As far as using prerendered 3D, I took a shot at the chaos emerald at the end of the special stage. As my work with Blender usually goes, it turned out better than expected, but not nearly as good as I wanted. Actually this probably doesn't even fit in this thread... someone mentioned prerendered rather than actual 3D in attempt to keep everything sonic-colorful and whatnot, so I tried making the emerald. Now that I think of it, making this was probably pointless
This emerald misses the reflection (check here El's) I heard blender is well-known for his filters, are you able to produce a Pre-Rendered version of the Special Stage which looks like this? Thanks for your contribution! ^^
Haven't tried the background yet, but here is my result [so far] when I tried it As much as I tried, I couldn't get the toon shaders to look good at all (on those round things floating over the stage). Or at least, anywhere near what the mockup looked like. To be honest, most of the other ideas/concepts/whatever that people made are better. lol.
Indeed, very GOOD one as a first booth. -Try adding a different lighting, so to give more warmth to the environment (The tubes must have an orange shadowing) -The track's yellow stripes are not centred -The Spheres should generate different reflections as they share one light source in the middle of all them. P.s. Master Emerald could you provide him the PNG image of the starred Background? (In the correct wider aspect ratio)
Ohhhh, keep that up. It looks great. Some refinement and the Special Stages will turn out marvelous. :D
For that mockup I only have made half of the BG... Here is it in the PNG format and with the 4:3 aspect ratio: And here is the mockup I made some time ago in the PNG format and with the 4:3 aspect ratio too:
The Special Stages will come down to maintaining the original feel above all else. Recreating that effectively in 3D isn't easy, but I believe it is definitely possible. Compsense, your familiarity with the lighting system in your 3D package will determine much of this. You may want to try an exclusive/inclusive lighting system per object in that scene for better control.
Taking into consideration what CK said (specifically, "The Special Stages will come down to maintaining the original feel above all else"), I really tried to get the lighting right on those floating round things (can I call them mentos?). After an hour or so of fussing around with lights, I just couldn't get the same effect. So, I kind of cheated. To get the mentos looking just like, or close to, the mockup, I made a texture that I could UV map onto the mentos. This is getting longer than it needs to, I'll just cut to the "important parts". - Replaced the old lighting on the mentos, with an actual texture to try and look just like the mockup (or at least close to it) - Fixed the cylinders' color and placement - Tried to get the camera centered. I think I got it right this time - Added the background (Thanks ME!!) Should I keep the mentos like this? Or go back to the old lighting? Also, is there anything else I could do to improve it so far? I haven't tried to animate it yet, but it might prove a little bit more difficult because of what I did to keep everything looking the same as the mockup (as far as size goes), such as the cylinders. The farther you go down the track, the longer the cylinders had to be to look like the ones in the mockup. Also, the third set of mentos is about 40 units away from the 2nd, while the second set of mentos is about 30 units away from the first.
Sorry, but what's making it unsymmetrical? I thought I got the camera positioned (nearly) perfectly, so that the stripes looked just right :S
Whoops, thanks for pointing that out! Now it looks way off I'm pretty sure everything's centered and everything now, I even double checked in Gimp I guess another thing that I could try to fix is the light at the beginning.. it kinda stops too abruptly Edit: aha, I think the light looks much better now. No abrupt stopping, but it keeps that bright blue at the beginning
Damn, sorry I didn't respond sooner; I've been very busy with university work. I've had a look around and the only 3D demo I have to hand is this one I did last year; http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?kyz45tjm4t5 It's nothing amazing - it's a very simple game that implements some OpenGL rendering techniques, and cel shading. I had a much cooler cel shading demo I wanted to show you with coloured point lights, but I couldn't find it. I suspect Johnny might have a copy of it on his home computer so I'll ask him later, and if I can get a hold of it I'll post again. You might need this (visual studio 2005 SP1 runtime) if you get an application error - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en I've also got my current project, RoTo, but that uses orthogonal projection to make a 2D/3D sort of thing, and graphically it's not very impressive (it's quite simple actually - the only remotely interesting graphical effect is the use of compositors). I can't show you a binary of it, but I could show you some screenshots if you're interested :P EDIT: To answer your question about whether it's possible to make it colourful... Of course you can; you have the same amount of colours to work with, so why not? I'm not sure I like all those gradients though... I think the checker pattern would help a lot :P You'd be surprised; hardware is highly optimised for 3D these days, and you wouldn't need to use a lot of textures or polys for a scene like that.
Uh oh, wait a second. Isn't the aspect ratio still wrong in the 3D version? Real/Mockup/3D Also, note how the original tube's horizon was horizontal. We might need to cut it earlier and paste a colored wall in there, after all.
